Weekly Journal 5

Kaitlyn Gonzalez 

Weekly Journal 5

GIS-4636-091

October 6, 2020


Based on this week's Nevrin article, I think that yoga can be viewed/analyzed as a ritual because of the focus that you are putting into your practice. When you are practicing, for a beginner you might focus on "breathing, postures, and where to fix one's gaze" (Nervin 2020). This enables the person to be more focused and attentive to the practice, and therefore connecting with oneself. Moreover, Nevrin talks about feeling the body move as you go through these poses. This is something I had never really thought about. Simply focusing on the way your body feels, checking in with yourself, and feeling the slow-paced movement of your body and the way it stretches. Taking that with me into my practice this week, it helped me feel more in tune with my body and truly put my focus in one place. This technique of focusing on my body movement also helped if there were other distractions going on around me. For example, in my practice this week I did it at night where I heard many car horns, sirens, and other traffic noises while doing my practice. 

    For this week's practice, I decided to try something that focused on one part of my body, so that I could really get the full experience of yoga being a ritual and really focusing inward. Some of the things that were mentioned in the article, such as heightened sensitivity, attending to movement, and emotionality were all something I was able to experience when doing my practice. This week, I decided to try something called face yoga. I have struggled with migraines, tension headaches, and jaw pain most of my life, and I thought that this was something to do that might not only help that pain but bring myself inward. Since I could not find a long enough video of face yoga, I decided to do two videos to make up for the time, which ended up being around 35 minutes. The first video was taught by celebrity facial yoga trainer Koko Hayashi. Her face yoga is supposed to be anti-aging if done every day, which is something that I thought was an interesting take on yoga. She had been teaching facial yoga for about 10 years, and boasting about its anti-aging properties. 

    I also thought it was interesting about what Nevrin had mentioned about people in a deep depression and their feeling of body weight. I think that sometimes depression and sadness can be described as a physically 'heavy' feeling and it could literally feel like you are being weighed down in some instances. It is interesting the way Nevrin puts it as someone 'giving in' to their body weight and letting the sadness weigh them down. In my experience, yoga has made me feel lighter in a sense, not only emotionally but also physically. This is one way that yoga can be described as a ritual in a sense. It can almost be like a cleansing ritual, letting go of things in your life by focusing inward, and on the poses and motions that your body is going through. 

    For this specific facial yoga and how it pertains to a ritual, I do think that making yoga a ritual impacts the intensity of it. When you are able to make it a ritual, you can turn inward and really connect with yourself. As a ritual, you are able to connect with yourself, especially in this instance because of the facial yoga I did. It mainly focused on the movement of my face, neck, and ears. I was able to really connect and focus on the movements I was dong just on my face. Overall, this was definitely a different type of experience when it comes to yoga and something that I will be continuing because of my past with neck and head pain. 

   Videos: First Video: Face Yoga 101: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KXSjQ21o54

Second Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7xkKNByrRs


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